Augmented Translation & the Professional Translator

Augmented translation & the professional translator - the Neural Machine Translation hybrid that we all need

My message to you is that Augmented Translation is the best translation service for enterprise businesses. This way of working produces the best results in terms of quality, turnaround time and cost-efficiency. Sounds too good to be true, you think? Well with Augmented Translation you can have all three without making any sacrifices.

So how does Augmented Translation work exactly and what is it? Let me start off by giving you the full quote that I paraphrased in my previous LI-post.

“Human translators’ experience, creativity and mastery of the translation process flourishes with the use of an ever-improving digital toolkit. A key component of which is machine translation, based on a deep learning neural network.”

In a nutshell, this is actually what Augmented Translation represents. Professional translators need to stay at the centre of the translation process instead of simply becoming language cleaners who pick up the trash that bad machine translation has left!

Their input is invaluable; by reviewing translations they can create the best training data for customised deep learning MT models. The output of which is irreplaceable. Professional linguists are the ones who can meet enterprise businesses demands as the producers of the highest quality translations.

Now the fact that these linguists have a digital toolkit at their disposal is nothing new. CAT-tools (see Today I Learned episode 4) are a well-established workflow and consistency booster and have been around for some time. Companies that haven't integrated any software of this kind need to take a long hard look at themselves.

Translation memories, glossaries, term-bases— they all make the translator’s life easier, while helping secure brand consistency, tone of voice and ultimately better language communication for companies.

One thing that is new, is the way these digital tools play a role in the development of neural network models that can increase their benefits many times over. Bilingual content data plays a significant role throughout the iterative training process that all neural MTs need to reach for the quality levels required by enterprise businesses.

Translation memories especially, are weighted in the calculations carried out by neurons in hidden layers of encoding in a deep learning neural network. At the same time, all traditional digital tools are integrated into today’s premier CAT-tools, ensuring superior ease-of-use to the professional translator in making decisions.

Crucially in Augmented Translation, the results of neural MT are also instantly available in the CAT-tool, as pre-populated translations. At the same time these defer automatically to translated segments generated by translation memories and other content repositories, such as the aforementioned term-bases and glossaries.

As such, the professional translator has a wealth of information at their disposal, and with it a very solid foundation for the final translation. Their full creativity and mastery of language can be exerted in the areas of the text that require their full attention. The NMT-led digital toolkit buys them the time they need to focus on the final 10% of the work, allowing them to create a near-perfect translation. This is what matters the most.

So I've focussed on the translation process itself and the perfect synergy between professional translators and their digital counterparts, but there are three key take-aways that should be clear to anyone who carries business translation responsibility.

1. Augmented Translation is the most productive, cost-efficient and scalable high-quality translation approach available on the market.

2. Contrary to traditional translation workflows and due to the nature of its advanced technological setup, continuous training and improvement, Augmented Translation will continuously deliver better results, the more content data you own and the more translations you produce.

3. When it comes to scalability and flexibility, augmented translation offers an unparalleled ease in project management and establishing workflows for new markets and languages.

In case you are interested in having a conversation on augmented translation and how it can be implemented in your company’s translation and localisation processes, I would be delighted to speak with you.

You can contact me at [email protected], connect with me here on LinkedIn, or book a meeting in my calendar here.